March 11, 2020 - 4:25 AM
JERUSALEM - The Palestinian health ministry on Wednesday said Israeli troops shot and killed a 15-year-old boy during clashes near the West Bank city of Nablus.
The ministry says Mohammed Hamayel was shot in the head by a live bullet during confrontations with Israeli soldiers in the village of Beita and died in a hospital shortly after. The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the incident.
Dozens of Palestinians were protesting at the site in response to what they called an Israeli plan to confiscate land for nearby settlements. Palestinian witnesses said the Israeli military arrived to disperse the protest, and the protesters began hurling stones at the soldiers. The witnesses said the Israeli forces responded with tear gas and rubber-coated bullets.
The health ministry, however, said the deceased was struck by a live bullet.
Clashes often erupt in the Israeli-occupied West Bank between Palestinian protesters and the Israeli military, which typically uses non-lethal means to disperse the crowds.
Israel captured in the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, territories the Palestinians want for their future state.
The Israeli settlement watchdog group Peace Now said late last month that Israel is moving forward on plans to build more than 1,700 homes for settlers in the West Bank.
The approvals came weeks after the Trump administration unveiled its long-anticipated Mideast plan, which sides with Israel on many of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s main points of contention.
It envisions Israel annexing parts of the West Bank, including its 120 settlements and the 500,000 settlers who live there. It falls short of granting the Palestinians a state, offering them limited autonomy over disjointed chunks of land but only if they meet a set of stringent demands that would require them to drastically alter what has been their baseline for negotiations for decades.
News from © The Associated Press, 2020